Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Monday, May 09, 2016

Island Home by Tim Winton review – a love song to Australia and a cry to save it

In his wonderfully honest memoir cum manifesto Tim Winton traces how he came to revere the natural world he grew up in – and long to preserve it

‘Space was my primary inheritance’: gum trees on the floodplain in Western Australia. Photograph: Alamy

Island Home is Tim Winton’s insightful and vibrant testament to what it is to be a non-indigenous Australian living in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Less than 3% of Australia’s population can trace their ancestry in the country to a time that predates photography. Despite up to 60,000 years of continuous human habitation, it is still the landscape that leaves the strongest impression. Australia is “a place where there is more landscape than culture… Everything we do... is still overborne and underwritten by the seething tumult of nature”.

The book is in part a love song to Australia and also an attempt to trace how this love affair began, as well as where it might go next. The structure is episodic and non-linear with some chapters only a page or two in length, and yet each one works as a stand-alone piece. I was reminded of handling a deck of cards, the apparently random juxtaposition of memories – in terms of time – as seemingly arbitrarily arranged as a shuffled pack. The book progresses thematically, not sequentially. Edmund White said “you have to tell the truth when you’re writing what purports to be a memoir”, and Winton conveys a searing sense of honesty